ioFTPD v7.5.9 Released (Beta)

[Flow]

(oh well, someone gotto start rolling)

Merry Christmas Yil, thanks you for your effort in the past keeping ioFTPD project alive. Lets hope stability and new kewl feature are coming farward in the next 2011 season Best wishes /Flow

[Yil]

Thanks Flow. I don't think Santa is going to have the next release finished by tomorrow morning, however there is a pretty good chance it will squeak out before the year ends

Feel free to point out features you want or identify problems. I'm currently working on TCL manipulation of the various ban lists...

On a different note, I also got some dumps from a site running nxtools/ninja/etc that is experiencing plain old crashes. I didn't think that was a problem anymore! Interestingly enough all of the crashes happened somewhere inside the OpenSSL library which seems an unlikely coincidence...

Is anybody else having actual crashes and if so what scripts are you using? Do you run the windrop bot that comes with ioNinja (it uses the shared memory interface)?

[Yil]

Good news! While working on the next release I clicked through to lookup how something was done in a function I knew did something similar and realized that code did it wrong. This is a memory corruption issue and thus a possible source of problems for everyone as it's in a utility library that is used in a variety of places. It probably affects larger sites more as the directory cache code is most likely to trigger the bug when removing items from the cache because of directory deletion or because of too many items in a bucket.

I'll see about getting a v7.5.11 release out tomorrow for folks since I'm still working on v7.6.

[Yil]

I was curious how long this bug has been there after I wrote the last message and went back and looked. It was in the original 5.8.5 code I inherited, but it's probably slightly more likely to be an issue in newer releases as they have more functionality and thus make use of this utility library more.

[Flow]

I think this have been up before, but worth begging for it again. You think you can devide update into 2 pakages?
- Full_install.zip
- update-from-to-verion.zip

Save bandwidth and easier upgrading if thare small .ini changes.

Looking farward to the quickfix ver before the 7.6 milestone. Looking farward removing the 'beta' stamp on the daemon soon.

[Yil]

Doh! Turns out I was wrong. I became convinced it had to be correct since too many things would have broken, so I fired up the debugger and it looks fine. Sorta feel stupid now since it should have been clear what was going on and I missed it...

Ah well, back to work on v7.6. Sorry for the interruption...

[Flow]

I dunno howfar you have come with ioYil. I was thinking about adding basic system commands function. Um, like

- site close REASON
- site open REASON
- site shutdown REASON

Im pretty sure thare are more like basic function commands that should be standard within a ftpd. You see whare im going?

[Yil]

I hate to tell you this Flow... but you try 'site help' yet? Make sure it's an 'M' flagged account to see the full list.

Site close (with a variety of options) along with a reason already exists and users trying to login giving a valid user/pass will be told the site is closed and why if a reason was given... You can even exempt any users you want from site closures. Site shutdown (with an optional grace period) exists as well however you can't give a reason right now. It's simple enough to add a reason if you want that.

v7.6 offers a new option to site close to close the site to normally exempt users except the user issuing the command and one other permanently exempt user (usually ioFTPD) in the config file. This is primarily for system maintenance type operations where you don't want anybody online while the system is in a fragile state. I even offer the ability to open/close the site via TCL now and have changed the startup logic so you can script the server to start closed so nobody can login.

[fr0st]

7.5.9 running great so far. Quick question though. Does anyone run a autonuker with this version and if you do which one do you use? Thanks

[Flow]

autoNuker ... hmm .. i think if i remember correctly the name of the script is ioA

[Yil]

Just a quick update. I was working on a few new features for the server I think everyone will like, and got sidetracked I've now significantly changed how the server configuration information is internally stored and used which will provide numerous long term benefits but it took a while to get it right. Just wanted to let you know I'm busy working on it...

[SRH99]

Sounds really great Yil.

I'm very grateful that you keep pushing on making ioftpd better and better.

Thanks..

[Pjevser]

I got my problem fixet my reinstalling ioftpd, but now i ended up with a new problem.

I have for 1-2 days could transfer with 6mb/s but now i have problems with bandwidth, i only get around 1.30mb/s and i have tried to reinstall ioftpd and try to change settings in .ini files. I use IoGui2 and have of course tried to set the UL/DL limit up or down, or turn it off but that dont help anything, speed stays where it is.

When i try to transfer with my other ftp, which use gene6 i can easily get speed around 6-10mb/s. So i dont realy get why ioftpd wont get up there anymore

In ioFTPD.ini the 4 settings:

Global_Inbound_Bandwidth
Global_Outbound_Bandwidth
Client_Inbound_Bandwidth
Client_Outbound_Bandwidth

they are all 4 disabled (they have ; in front) i did try enable the 2 Global and set it to 9999999 but that didnt change anything either.

So any ideas?

[Yil]

Are you using 7.5.10? Grab the .9 zip and then the .10 exe-only file if not. That should solve the performance issue some people saw when using SSL to transfer files. If you aren't using SSL/TLS then it probably won't fix it... You can also play with the number of IoThreads in the config file if you have lots of transfers going.

I've been doing a lot of work for the next release and have a "big" TO-DO list of things I'd like to fix/change/optimize at some point in the future. I did notice a few transfer related performance things I'd like to change and I'm pretty sure I can up the total max throughput of the server, but at the moment I do 40MB/sec+ testing locally via the most secure cipher openSSL offers. Even if I could get ioFTPD up to 80MB/sec the only people that should affect would be gbit servers. You should have no issues saturating a 10/50/100mbit link as I see that all the time.

A FAR bigger thing to get right is to get the network settings. If you have packet loss, delays, etc then the large TCP windows are a drawback... I'm not sure what to tell you on that front, but if you can provide some details comparing the 2 different server setups under test conditions that could prove useful. For instance are both servers transferring only one file and if you switch which one is transferring does the bw differs every time? If you have multiple transfers then all bets are off in my experience so try to only have one going. A fast download from the server can starve uploads, and vice versa. Is this using SSL and if so are they using different ciphers?

[Flow]

whut?? .10 whare?